Undoing what Doris did

Now is the time of year when I start to visit more garden centres than fabric shops. Last May, I spent a weekend tidying up a corner of the garden and trying to minimise the visual impact our neighbour’s very large Leylandii was having on our fence at the bottom of our garden. Improvements were made and the corner went from this:

  

to  this

  
Despite us offering to contribute to the cost of having the some of the height removed, our neighbour was not interested and so we were left with a garden in shade for most of the day and an ever increasing tree. That was until February this year when Storm Doris paid a visit and removed the tree for us, but sadly taking our lilac and half our fence with it.
 

The neighbour was not in any rush to sort things out after the bulk of the tree was removed from his garden (he was very lucky it was not from his house!), so with help from a good friend we manage to remove the remains of our lilac and put a temporary fence fix in place working around the Leylandii stump.
  

I had that view from my kitchen window until the beginning of this month when the neighbour decided that the only way to remove the stump was to burn it! I had a week of coming home to bonfires at the bottom of the garden and wondering if the rest of our fence would survive (if you look closely, you can see the fire got rather too close to our neighbour’s new side fence).
    

On Easter Saturday, our friend came back and helped us remove enough of the stump so we could finally replace the fence posts and panels. Very large holes were dug and few “finds” were discovered from the days when our garden was part of a row of terrace houses.
 

By mid-afternoon the new fence was in place and by late afternoon everything had been tidied and levelled and the plants I had managed to rescue back in February were placed ready for replanting.
  

  

Last weekend saw at trip to the garden centre for some grass seed and something to replace the lilac (I went for a jasmine that can climb the trellis this year and perhaps move on to something bigger next year) and Sunday was spent planting, raking, relocating the bench, painting, and sowing grass seed.
  

What the photo doesn’t show are two very large wood pigeons who are taking a great deal of interest in the grass seed. Hopefully it starts growing soon and I can get back to sewing not sowing.